Take charge of your mornings - early risers rule

By Claudia Feldman |
September 7, 2012

'What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast'
By Laura Vanderkam
Penguin Publishing,
330 KB, 35 pp., $2.99

Write a book.

Train for a marathon.

Tackle the big project at work that never gets done.

If you think you don't have time for any of the above, says Laura Vanderkam, author, blogger and mother of three, think again.

The trick, she says, is taking advantage of the early morning hours.

Vanderkam specializes in issues related to time, money and productivity. At 33, she's already published three books, "All The Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending," "168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think," and "Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues."

Her latest effort is a 10,000 word e-book, "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast."

If you want your mornings to be so successful it barely matters what you do at 3 p.m., Vanderkam offers these suggestions:

Think about how you spend your time now.

Eliminate the activities that take time and energy but don't need to be done by you. If, for example, you're loading school backpacks every night, chances are the kids should be doing that themselves.

Imagine what you could accomplish by rolling out of bed an hour or two earlier. (Vanderkam hesitates to define "early morning." It could be 4:30 a.m. for some time-poor individuals or 8 a.m. for college students.)

Finally, set your alarm, keep your mitts off the snooze button, get up and get going.

One woman in a time management workshop with Vanderkam was frustrated because she was interrupted so frequently at work that she wasn't making progress on long-term projects.

This same woman was dropping her daughter off at school at 7 a.m. for water polo practice, then driving to work and cleaning out her in-box.

Vanderkam suggested that she forget about her in-box and use the quiet interlude at work for the demanding projects that had been worrying her.

After a few weeks, the woman was thrilled with her new efficiency. She told Vanderkam she was getting more work done before breakfast than she used to do in an entire day.

While that woman was taking care of business, Vanderkam says others choose to use their early morning hours to nurture themselves or their families.

Another parent in a workshop was frustrated because she had to work late almost every night, and she felt she was missing valuable time with her baby.

Kids tend to wake up frightfully early anyway, Vanderkam says, so the solution for that mom was to spend the early morning playing with her daughter. When the woman did leave for work, she was happy and guilt-free.

Many of the super-organized early risers are multitasking.

Vanderkam mentions former Pepsico chairman and CEO Steve Reinemund, who would wake up at 5 a.m., run four miles, pray and eat breakfast with his family before heading to the office.

Of course, one problem with all the super-duper time management ideas is that we can get time-managed to death. We are, most of us think, working as efficiently as we can. Enough already!

The point, Vanderkam responds mildly, is not to squeeze more, more, more out of people but to help them spend their time in a more focused and productive way.

Another problem is that some folks are so distracted by work, late night TV and the Internet that they are going to bed later, making it difficult if not impossible to wake up early, as Vanderkam suggests.

"Burning the candle at both ends is a problem," she says. "I love staying up late. It's quiet, the kids are in bed, it's 'me' time and I don't want to give it up."

But, she says, adults need to establish bed times just as much as kids do. "If you're surfing the Web or watching TV at 1 a.m., you'll never get up in the morning."

Vanderkam, who also writes the "168 Hours" blog for CBS MoneyWatch, used to spend her early mornings running in her suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. Then her best laid plans for the 168 hours in her week changed.

"My 10-month-old daughter decides when my morning starts. When she wants to eat, that involves me."